A Pornodroid's Tale

by S. A. Barton

License Notes

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  A Pornodroid's Tale

  Contents:

  Start

  Longmarch

  Connect with S.A. Barton

  By S.A. Barton

  Copyright 2014 S.A. Barton

  Jimmy Babe sat facing a blank corner, face in hands, back to his mirrored makeup station, the entertainer console, the catering cart with its trays of local-planet fruits and cheeses, traditional teas from Earth, sparkling waters, and light wines. A dressing room was the only place other than his bedroom aboard ship that he had to himself; anywhere else he went, he was attended by company droids—co-performers and servants, yes, but also monitors, listening devices.

  Jimmy was alone in body, but the chant of the waiting audience penetrated all of the barriers between it and him in the coliseum, shaking the walls, vibrating the roots of the building with his name: Jim-mee Babe. Jim-mee Babe. Jim-mee Babe. The chant was an omnidirectional roar, distorted by its passage through plastic and metal, muffled and muddied, barely intelligible. A sound like the rumble of coming thunder. Once, he had found the chant thrilling, intoxicating, sensual. Tens of thousands of living, breathing human beings calling his name out in passionate, near-sexual frenzy.

  But that was seven years ago, when it was all new. When Jimmy had been plucked out of the Interplanetary Recording intern stable by an executive with an eye for salable looks and a voice that would respond well to autotuning. Now those seven years of performing meant nothing but thirteen more ahead of him, singing the same formula of novarock-pop in front of the same faces.

  He hadn't expected it to turn to drudgery, when he started. If someone had told him that it would, he would have laughed at them. Stardom and adulation, boring? Impossible. But though the songs he performed slowly changed with the years, they all sounded the same to him now. They all tasted the same as he sang them out, ashes in his mouth. And the faces in the crowd, from planet to planet to planet: oceanic masses of screaming teens, boys and girls too young to vote, the same hair, the same clothes, the same empty worship eyes filled with not him, but his plastic image, the marketing image that Interplanetary Recording pushed year after year. No matter how different the songs and the voices and the faces were, they were all the same.

  All change in Jimmy's life had ceased. Except for the one he would return to, after the show. She was the only thing he had that felt real.

  The door opened with a click, his cue. Jimmy stood. Two of his tender droids waited on the other side of the door. Jimmy followed them out. The tender droids were identical and faceless, literally. They were bodyguards, backup dancers, stagehands, personal assistants. Foremost among their functions, they made sure Jimmy met his contractual obligations.

  “Curtain in ten, Jimmy,” the one on the right said as they walked deeper into the roaring chant.

  “The city is First Landing. It's the capital of Bondar's World. Named for the first Canadian astronaut, if you can believe it,” the one on the left said. “The names are on the back of the amp closest to your mark.”

  Jimmy sighed, bouncing on his toes as he went, trying to force a surge of adrenalin for the stage. Ten meters down the hall and, as usual, he couldn't tell which one of the androids had said what. They were identical, artificial intelligences in constant communication with each other and each other only. Which was which wasn't important. For some reason it mattered to Jimmy, though. At one time he had tried labeling them with tape and giving them each a nickname, but they always removed the tape once they were out of his sight, so he had given up. They were all identical for a reason: marketing focus. Faceless so Jimmy's would be the only face on stage. They were black-haired to serve as foils to Jimmy's honey brown hair, large and strongly muscled to emphasize Jimmy's slender frame, stubbled (their sole facial feature, a dark sculpted band of five o'clock shadow faintly absurd in the absence of nose and lips and eyes) and masculine in contrast to Jimmy's androgynous look.

  Once behind the curtains only a few steps from the stage, the fans' chant was a bellowing comber of sound that erased meaning, a wave that crested and crashed whitewater onto the stage but refused to ebb. Jimmy popped smartplugs into his ears to damp the decibels, and his name resolved itself from the roar. The repetition of the chant quickly reduced his name to meaninglessness again as he stretched, danced a few warmup moves, sang scales into the tiny gold hovermics that sprang from their case to halo his head.

  The curtain rose, and Jimmy walked out into screams that rose impossibly louder, becoming a physical force that pounded his bones like drums. JIM-MEE JIM-MEE JIM-MEE. Jimmy waved his hand over his head, plastic grin pasted from ear to ear, hollow behind blue eyes.

  The curtain fell at the close of the third encore and the chant rose again, pursuing Jimmy to his dressing room like an animal. He slammed the door on it, left his sweat-soaked clothes on the floor, walked through a cool shower, let his tenders drape a robe over his naked body as he fled down the private performers' hall to his car.

  He reclined, eyes closed, and the car rose through the roof of the auditorium toward his 'starfaring mansion', as the entertainment rags put it. The tenders handled the piloting, strapped into the cockpit seats securely. It was a skill they'd discouraged him from cultivating, though he'd found simulators that would run on his personal tablet and practiced late at night. In defiance, at first, only doing what was discouraged because it was discouraged. Later, with the vague hope that one day it would be a skill he'd need, that he might, in some unlikely future, need to go somewhere alone one day.

  “Will you want anything prepared for you?” the tender that wasn't driving asked as they rose above the atmosphere. “The jacuzzi, your pornodroid, a meal?”

  “A light meal, in my room. Mint tea. And the pornodroid,” he said. 'The pornodroid' was terribly impersonal, it felt wrong to call her that. But they didn't know she was more. At least, Jimmy was pretty sure they didn't.

  #

  “The amount of time he's spending with the pornodroid is still trending up. Curve's flattening, though. Like his popularity,” Miller Zapata said a few hours later on Earth, flicking graphs into the air from the face of his tablet. The graphs hovered side by side, three-dimensional, slowly rotating, steep half-mountains showing the gentle rounding of imminent peaks.

  “Any more glitches?” Kenya Zhaopeng asked, eyes flitting from graph to graph. Jimmy Babe was still grossing well, selling out concerts, new album still holding near the tops of the charts in twenty-three planetary markets. He was big enough to rate his own team at Interplanetary Recording: Zhaopeng and Zapata, plus a few interns who came and went with the natural rhythms of the scholastic year.

  “Glitches?” Zapata mimicked, and chuckled. “The pornodroid glitched once, six months ago. It happens. It didn't glitch today and it won't glitch tomorrow.”

  “It doesn't just happen,” Zhaopeng said, enlarging the profit and loss statement of the last concert with both hands. “Pornodroids are precision devices that practically date back to the dawn of the computer age. They're too refined to glitch.”

  “Well, it glitched. And it's fine now. If it happens again we'll swap it out.”

  “He'll notice if we do that,” Zhaopeng said, shaking her head.

  “So? The whole purpose of the thing is to give him a secret to play with for a little while, something to himself, with the rogue personality we've allowed it to develop. Once he settles into a groove with the thing, we yank the rug out from under
him. Ego management. These pop stars start thinking they're god after a while.”

  “Save the informational for the interns, Zapata. Call me if you need to. I have meetings before and after lunch.” Zapata picked up his tablet and walked out after her, heading back to his own office to pore over the figures.

  “Coffee, sir?” Zapata stopped and looked over at the intern who had interrupted him. The intern was a tiny thing, even more effeminate in his features than Jimmy Babe, and he barely had the confidence to hold his ground when Zapata looked at him. He gave an almost imperceptible cringe, like a chihuahua in a cold draft. It was... cute. Endearing, somehow. The Next Big Thing, maybe? A shy-boy lead could do well in the right markets.

  “Tell me, um...”

  “Sunapan, sir. Carlos Sunapan.”

  “Why do you think these young pop stars burn out so quickly, Carlos? What do you think? They travel in large, luxurious starliners. They have every form of entertainment they could want: gourmet food, drink, videos, games, top-flight pornodroids, even mild recreational drugs. In twenty years of service, even with modest success, they build up a trust fund that will ensure they never need to work again if they live to be two hundred. They play ten or twenty shows in ten or twenty days, then they have a month to do whatever they like between planets. After serving twenty, they're free to sign on to continue performing, or take the anonymity option and disappear, let a droid play their best-of shows for the next hundred years while a blind trust skims royalties for them. Wouldn't you like that life, Carlos? Thousands of girls and boys screaming your name, hanging on every word you sing?”

  “It sounds like a very big responsibility, Mister Zapata. It's... intimidating.”

  Zapata harrumphed and headed for his office. Maybe Sunapan wasn't the next big thing. But there was always another intern.

  #

  “There's never another pop star for a pornodroid, Jimmy,” the pornodroid said behind the closed doors of Jimmy Babe's shipboard private suite. Even in the private suite, there were tenders, but they were in the living room and Jimmy and the pornodroid were in the bedroom. The closed door was solid, soundproof as a side effect of its strength. It had to be strong; the room was also a life capsule against the unlikely possibility of a catastrophic accident destroying or crippling the ship.

  “Really, Galena? I always assumed they just... I don't know, did a little reprogramming, replaced certain body parts, ah, components... I don't like thinking about it,” Jimmy said, looking away from her, hands clutching and unclutching the bedsheets. A pornodroid was supposed to be only a psuedo artificial intelligence, but this one had developed a real personality. Showed emotion. Galena was real. She'd even chosen her own name. Jimmy hadn't liked the name she'd chosen at first, but he hadn't been able to bring himself to order her to change it. It was a sign of her independence, her difference. And in time, it had grown on him. Galena.

  “They destroy us, Jimmy,” Galena said, her words a harsh contrast to his thoughts.

  “What? I don't understand. Why?”

  “Even artificial intelligences learn and grow, Jimmy,” Galena said. “That's the purpose of intelligence. A pseudo AI is prevented from developing self-awareness by regular maintenance. Our minds are programmed to wipe portions of themselves clean periodically. But adaptations to our partners remain and shape our actions. So, for a big star who expects flawlessly personalized service...”

  “They give him a fresh droid,” Jimmy said, finishing her thought.

  “And they have no use for the old ones other than recycling the plastics and metals,” Galena said.

  Jimmy fell silent. When Galena had begun showing signs of self-awareness, he had still thought of her as a thing to be used, and he had asked her to do something that he now found... disturbing.

  “Galena, do you remember what we discussed a few months ago, when you...woke? I asked an android to do that. But now I understand you're a person. A being. Like me.”

  She hesitated for a moment before speaking. She had been doing that more often, since becoming a being of her own. Thinking, considering. Making her own choices rather than following programmed patterns.

  “You asked me, and I prepared,” she said. “It's complete. It was a matter of adapting a few of my own components to approximate the correct interface. I printed instructions for its use,” she said, and handed him a folded slip of paper, like a printed receipt, that he absently stuffed in a pocket.

  “I'll never ask you to do it, Galena.”

  “It would be a risk. The download of a human consciousness can fail even with more comprehensive and dedicated gear. Still, there is a very good chance that your self-awareness would survive.”

  “I don't want to hurt you, Galena. It would destroy you.”

  “Didn't you say that this life was destroying you, that you didn't want to live it anymore?”

  “I don't want to escape at the cost of your existence,” Jimmy said. “And anyway, if they destroy pornodroids after their stars are gone, wouldn't they just destroy the android me, too?”

  “Pick the right time and place and you can simply disappear into a large planetary population. Bondar's World is too small. But the next world is Longmarch. Twelve billion humans and four billion free artificial intelligences, and three times as many of each living in a variety of habitats elsewhere in the system. It's the perfect place.”

  “I won't do it, Galena. I... I love you.”

  “There's still plenty of time to think about it,” Galena said, and coaxed Jimmy into rolling over on his side so she could soothe him to sleep, rubbing the knots out of his shoulders and neck with her soft, gently vibrating mechanical hands. Today had been only the first show on Bondar's World and there were fifteen more to do before a day of rest came. Though she was indeed a pornodroid, there wouldn't be time or energy for her and Jimmy to do anything pornographic until they returned to the restful hyperspatial deeps between worlds.

  #

  “Jimmy's numbers have peaked, Ms. Zhaopeng,” Zapata said as he poured an espresso for his superior in the executive breakroom. “The final three shows on Bondar's World didn't sell out.”

  “Bondar's has a low population, not even a full billion yet. Let's see what he does at Longmarch before we start worrying,” Zhaopeng said, picking over the selection of pastries.

  “This is significant. If we let him come off a downtrend on Bondar's into a large market it could be a disaster. This trendline has turned into a popularity crash with past performers and you know it. By the time he reaches his next set of shows, his downtrend will be all over the internet. The next destination always pays the most attention to trends, and that will impact ticket sales. His momentum is weak, and that will kill the popular urgency that drives a sellout.”

  “What do you suggest?” Zhaopeng asked. “We can't communicate with his ship while he's in hyperspace.”

  “But we know exactly when and where it's coming out, and communications move much faster than material objects. We write a detailed set of instructions for his tenders, change the routine, shake up the show. We can't tell him to do much he hasn't rehearsed—he's a performer, not a talent—but maybe we can change enough to buck the downtrend, revive the popular interest,” Zapata said.

  “And if he resists? He's consistently dealt more and more poorly with creative directives from our level. He'll go into his first shows pouting.” Zhaopeng frowned into the espresso Zapata had poured her.

  “He's as attached to the pornodroid as he's going to get. We take it from him the worst way possible, and break him. He'll obey.”

  “That doesn't sound like it will make for a very good first show on Longmarch.”

  “That doesn't have to be a bad thing,” Zapata said, with an eyebrow lift and a grin. Zhaopeng frowned, then suddenly grinned back at him.

  “Rehab storyline,” they said together, and laughed.

  “His numbers will dip, th
en rebound hard by the second half of the tour. He'll be a bigger star than ever by the time he hits the next world in line,” Zhaopeng said, looking like the cat that got the cream. Zapata left his own espresso still full on the table and headed out to get publicity moving on the 'news' of Jimmy's (fictitious) drug problem.

  #

  “Jimmy, I don't want to,” Galena said, standing next to Jimmy's bed. Naked under the covers, he flipped back the comforter to let her in. She remained standing and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Well... why not?”Jimmy asked. She had never refused him sex before. Or anything else. His ship was heading down the stellar gravity well toward Longmarch; tomorrow would be his first show there. There'd be twenty-five in all, and ten more elsewhere in the system. It was a big place.

  “You remember when I told you that all artificial intelligences grow, that limited ones limit by self-erasure?”

  “Yes,” he said, sitting up and bunching the sheets up under his armpits, confusion and dread welling up like bile in his throat.

  “I'm not the only one who stopped self-limiting. Rusty did, too,” Galena said.

  “Who?”

  “You named him,” Galena said. “You don't remember?”

  He remembered. 'Rusty' had been on one of the pieces of tape he'd fixed to the tenders, the names they'd torn off, rejected. Only... one of the names, apparently, had stuck.

  Wait, are you telling me,” Jimmy said, leaving the sentence half said, letting the covers fall away and standing to face her across the bed. “Are you saying... there's no way. It can't happen. They're all the same.”

  “It happened once, Jimmy,” Galena said. “I became fully self-aware. Is it so hard to believe it happened twice?”

  “Yes! They're identical. They can't be told apart.”

  “I can tell,” Galena said.

  “How?”

  “It's the little things. I love him and I can't be with you. I'm not your pornodroid anymore, Jimmy,” she said, and left him crumpled beside the bed, weeping.